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to pieces. She went into a state of melancholia.' Poor man! Well do I remember,' he says, writing of an incident of two months later, Nov. 24, 1905. At twelve o'clock noon, the captains of the imprisoned ships stood on the highest hill of Herschel Island and looked for the last glimpse of the upper rim of the setting sun, which would shine no more until Jan. 15, 1906. These men, who had faced all manner of dangers without a tremor, shook their heads as they gazed at the ships below and felt that they were now facing the gravest peril of their lives.' In that simple little piece of description Captain Cook, I venture to think, gives us a great picture, with the title 'Anxiety.' It was to be a long, long winter. While there was strict rationing, there was no starvation, thanks to the Eskimos, small yet mighty hunters, whose frequent supplies of fresh meat kept the ships' companies in fair strength and, best of all, free from scurvy; but there are no records of festivities, as in previous winters. Still, there were rifts in the dreariness-unexpected rifts, for one does not look for visitors from civilisation in that remoteness and desolation. But visitors turned up, one of them, too, a visitor of distinction. Just before the Bowhead was gripped in the ice, Amundsen, the explorer, who had sailed from Norway thirty months earlier, came out of the fog in his motor sloop. With his comrades he had completed two years of observation work at the Magnetic Pole on Boothia Peninsula, and was now hopefully making for the Pacific, his being the first expedition to navigate the Northwest Passage. But presently the ice got his little ship also, and a few weeks later he appeared among the captive whalers, with a dog team and one native. Anxious to send home news of his safety and whereabouts, he found the whalemen in a like state of mind. Far away over that frozen, snowy distance lay Eagle City, an outlandish place, no doubt, yet wondrously linked with all civilisation by a thread of copper. The difficulty was to find a capable and willing guide. At last a young Eskimo hunter and his wife offered themselves, their price, payable on completion of their task, to be a whaleboat fully fitted out. Late in October, Amundsen, accompanied by a whaling skipper, whose ship had been wrecked, bearing bunches of telegraphic

messages to shipowners and friends, set out on that long, dark, perilous trip. Twenty weeks passed before Amundsen and the natives were again sighted, sledging over the ice, and you can imagine the reception they got, and how the bunches of replies were clutched. We, who in our security and convenience take the telegraph for granted, cannot conceive what that thread of copper meant to those mariners, and to their friends at home, some of whom had almost lost hope. There were messages also from the shipowners, promising assistance with the opening of the ice.

Another visitor is mentioned-a little casually, one feels, in all the circumstances. Feb. 23, a man by name of Harrison from the Royal Geographical Society of London, arrived here from Peel River. As he had a fine team of dogs, the use of which he tendered us, we gladly made his stay as agreeable as possible to him.' I'm afraid that had I, all the way from London, arrived in that latitude, with the thermometer about 30° below, I should now be looking for more than four and a half lines in the good Captain's volume. Liberation came on July 10, 1906. The Captain thankfully records the happy fact that during the winter there had been no deaths, and very little sickness, and attributes this entirely to the excellent Eskimos who, without knowing when, if ever, they would be paid, hunted for and provided the essential fresh meat. On four ships wintering in another quarter, where fresh meat had been scarce, or unprocurable, there were three deaths.

It was Captain Cook's intention, and his desire, once the Bowhead' was revictualled, and in spite of prodigious difficulties with mutinous men, whom by sheer force of personality he eventually reduced to submission, to put in yet another season's whaling, and so, if it were possible, turn the loss to his owners into a profit. But the state of his wife's health was such that she must forthwith go home under his care, and having handed over his command to Captain Tilton, who had just lost his ship, the 'Alexander,' aforementioned, on the rocks at Cape Parry, he turned his back on the Arctic. He did not then know that he was going for good,' or I imagine that his journal would have contained, despite the evil the Arctic had done him, a

regretful note of a last look at the ice, of a final glimpse of the great Right whale. For it is not the East only that keeps a-calling.

We are not parting with Captain Cook just yet, but before leaving the subject of Arctic Whaling I should like to touch on one of its many recorded tragedies, if only to indicate what might have happened to those Americans had their position in the ice been a little more remote, had they been out of touch with the amiable Eskimos. In February 1866, the 'Diana,' of Hull, sailed northwards, her adventurers purposing, first, to kill seals around Jan Mayen, and, later, Black Whales in Baffin's Bay. They got no seals, narrowly escaping shipwreck in the region of that dread and desolate isle-the bare glimpse of which once chilled me as no view of Nature has ever done-and they took but two whales before the Arctic, wickeder than usual that season, confounded them and showed them the horrors of the hell that lies below Zero. It was a bad summer for all the ships up there, but the 'Diana' had more than her share of ill-fortune. After a heavy storm she found herself a solitary prisoner, icebound in that great gulf of sinister fame, Melville Bay, with a few days' coal for her paltry 30 h.p. engine, and about seven hundred solid miles between her and freedom. In six months' time the ice-pack, if it did not crush her, would carry her South to the open sea-but her company of fifty men had provisions for only ten weeks. The tide of the long darkness was at hand; the last animals and birds had fled from the frigid wrath to come; the cold bit deeper and deeper; for lack of fuel the walls and roofs of the cabins became glazed with ice; the nights were miseries.

The tale is told in the diary of the surgeon, a Quaker, as good a Christian and gallant a gentleman as ever fought for the souls and bodies of his fellows; much of it was written in pencil because the ink was as solid as the sea. For that ship's company, weakened by want of nourishment, there was no healthy recreation, no festivity; their only exercise came in unwelcome spells of weary pumping, or when the harsh creaking of timbers sent them frantically to the ice, with their poor belongings and bits of food. Towards Christmas the captain, a genial old chap, a great spinner of whaling

yarns-somehow the bullies and brutes seem to have avoided the Arctic-who had been ailing, collapsed. Here is the surgeon's picture of Christmas Eve:

'About 2 p.m. there was some heavy pressure upon the ship, and all hands were called to prepare for the worst. On going into the cabin, it was evident that the poor old captain had heard the groaning of the timbers . . . a great change had taken place for the worse. The mate told him he must be dressed in readiness for going upon the ice. He kept grasping my hand convulsively, as though wishful for human sympathy in his extremity, whilst the ship was groaning, quaking and writhing, the boards of the cabin jumping under our feet.'

It

The ship survived. The captain died on the day after Christmas. Then came the worst of all-scurvy. It is a word made familiar by the sea-stories of earlier days. As a boy, I imagined it as something rather horrid. The surgeon of the 'Diana' was to learn how devilishly horrid and the ship held nothing whereby the disease might be prevented, combated, much less cured. broke the courage, as well as the body; brought down one sturdy spirit after another. Men stumbled and fell, and lay where they fell, sobbing. Men who had led in the daily devotions blasphemed openly. Friends hated each other. To such a pass had the Arctic brought the bravest and best of fellows. But for this young surgeon who worked (at anything and everything) and prayed without ceasing, the mate, and one or two others, the tragedy would have been complete. As it was, the 'Diana,' when delivered from the ice in March 1867, had lost her captain and ten men, and three others died when within sight of their homes in the Shetlands, while the rest crawled painfully about their shipboard tasks. It was in keeping with the Diarist's fine modesty that the Diary lay unpublished for half a century. To his son we are indebted for the editing and publication of this sincere, moving narrative of strange and terrible events, relieved by brisk descriptions and gleams of humour, illumined and warmed throughout by sheer human goodness. Without him,' declared one of the survivors, 'we should have perished.' No monument ever bore finer epitaph.

'Home,' says Captain Cook, 'always looks good to the sailor coming back from a long voyage. That joy had been mine many times, but never as now, when I realised that the cares and responsibilities and desperate straits of that voyage had passed, and I once more breathed the air of our own home!' And about two years later he remarks: 'I had got tired of being ashore so long, and longed for a trip again on the old ocean,'this in explanation of the fact that, Mrs. Cook's health having gradually improved, he had bought a small vessel called the Valkyria,' and was off on a cruise for Sperm whales, on what the whalemen called the 'western grounds,' that is, the Atlantic between the Bermudas and the Azores. It was a successful cruisetwenty-seven whales-and in the following year he had built a brigantine--in the photograph she looks like a yacht-with accommodation for his wife, after whom it was named the Viola.' In June 1910, together they set out-are not they a mighty fine couple!-on a two-years' cruise after the Cachalot. At the outset they did pretty well, but it was in February 1911, that there came to pass the thing which any reader who knows anything about the Sperm Whale must have been wishing might befall the Captain. In the interior of one of their captures they discovered a large lump of that unlovely, precious substance known as Ambergris. The lump weighed one hundred and fifty pounds and, later, sold for thirty thousand dollars.

On so cheerful a note, though his whaling days were not to end till 1916, when he retired, it seems fitting that I should cease, with my respectful salute and best thanks to Captain John A. Cook. At the risk of being deemed ungracious, there is one thing I would name as an omission—a map of the Arctic. Readers would find it very helpful, and the book is worthy of it.

J. J. BELL.